short essays

Journal of Negro Education

A Philosophical Approach to the Study of Minority Problems Author(s): Eugene C. Holmes Source: The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 38, No. 3, American Minority Groups and Contemporary Education (Summer, 1969), pp. 196-203 Published by: Journal of Negro Education Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2294002 . Accessed: 19/04/2011 07:25

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jne. .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Journal of Negro Education is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Negro Education.

http://www.jstor.org

CHAPTER II

A PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF MINORITY PROBLEMS

EUGENE C. HOLMES

Professor of Philosophy, Howard University

Humanist and ethical considerations de- mand philosophical analysis when any at- tention is paid to minority group problems. Perhaps these problems are largely thought of as being more within the purview and concern of the behavioral and social sci- ences, rather than of philosophy and ethics. Traditionally, philosophers have isolated themselves from the problems of society. Rather, philosophers have concemed them- selves with religion, the soul or spirit, ideas or forms, logic and metaphysics, lan- guage and the like. Without indicting the philosophers who avoid the mundane and material because philosophy "bakes no bread," it is relevant to refer to Marx's famous gloss on Feuerbach that up until then (1844) philosophers had only sought to interpret the world but that now it was time to change the world. And in reply to Proudhon's Philosophy of Poverty, Marx wrote his Poverty of Philosophy.

Problems which arise out of majority and minority group relations and con- flicts do not ordinarily lend themselves to strict philosophical analysis. Philosophical sociologists, sociological historians and phi- losophers who are pessimists refer to "de- humanization," "alienation," "the mark of oppression," "the human tragedy" or "pre- dicament," "polarization" and the like. As Dr. Esther Jackson has written with ref- erence to American philosophy:1

1 Esther Merle Jackson, "A Tragic 'Sense' of the Negro Experience," Freedomways, VII (Winter, 1967).

American philosophy, with its inter- ests in socially and politically useful sys- tems of thinking, has produced as yet, no genuinely ethical approach to the complex social, economic and political problems of this culture. Rather, the main stream of American thought, espe- cially that of the twentieth century, has been occupied with an attempt to cut away the ethical context surrounding hu- man behavior, in order to guarantee the efficiency of the instruments of thought and action.

Indeed, with the exception of Alain Locke,2 in the three-hundred-year history of American philosophy, there have been only a few assays by American philoso- phers into any discussion of the race prob- lem, one brief essay by James, another by Royce in Race Questions, Provincial- ism and Other American Problems, (1908) and an occasional excursion by George Herbert Mead. There can and there must be a philosophical approach to mi- nority problems if only because these prob- lems are rooted in conflict and because they are intimately related to and tied up with the essential nature of the struggles for human freedom. This necessitates a paradigmatic approach to the American experience which was shaped by the re- quirements and demands of a slave so- ciety and these have been concerned with

2 Alain Leroy Locke and Bernhard J. Stern, When Peoples Meet: A Study in Race and Culture Contacts. New York, 1942, The Progressive Education Associates. This fa- mous classic on majority-minority group con- tacts is now out of print.

196

THE STUDY OF MINORITY PROBLEMS 197

the upward struggle of the Negro people -for human freedom and the subsequent liberation of all segments of the oppressed ,of the earth.

The problems arising out of majority- minority group relations are multifaceted. Any analysis of these problems must be in terms of the socio-economic and psycho- logical relationships of any particular so- ciety in any historical epoch whether it be tribal, primitive, caste, feudal, slave or class. In America, where neither feud- alism nor monarchy existed, minority prob- lems were always peculiar to any particu- lar region. The white settlers became the majority after the subduing and deraci- nation of the Indians. The religious groups which came - Puritans, Unitarians, Quak- ers, Pietists, Lutherans, Methodists and Jews -were assimilated and realized their aims in release from religious persecutions.

American society became a dominantly Anglo-Saxon-Protestant majority which as- sumed the control of all of the means of production of both the slavocracy and the industrial system.

In modern American society, the cul- ture contacts with the larger immigrant groups which settled in America in the nineteenth century were calculated to keep the minority groups as far apart as pos- sible. The sizable minorities, German, Polish, Irish, Italian, Hungarians-were assimilable as they usually settled in en- clave neighborhoods and they had their own churches, stores, schools and cultural groups and they retained their languages. The Jewish immigrants of their own voli- tion and for other reasons settled in ghettos and managed a viable ethnocentrism with their language and dialect, their cultural and religious differences and even ethnic variation in the case of the Black Jews.

The socio-economic facts of American life dictated that not one of these minority group experiences could be compared with those of the urban ordeal from which most of Negro experience has arisen.

The problems arising out of the culture contacts and relationships which exist be- tween the Southern Negro and the poor whites in the South are not at all irrecon- concilable. The common denominators- landlessness, stark poverty, hunger, illit- eracy, malnutrition-are color blind. Mal- nutrition accounts for high infant mortal- ity rates, irreversible brain damage and constitutes a danger to the nation because retarded youth are backward in school and have difficulties in the job market. In 1968, the Citizens Crusade Against Pov- erty released a study which said: "Hunger and malnutrition exist in this country, affecting millions of our fellow Americans and increasing in severity and extent from year to year." This study said that wide- spread malnutrition contributed to the "withdrawal, apathy, alienation, frustra- tion and violence" exhibited by so many of the poor. "The boys and girls we saw were hungry-weak, in pain, sick. They are suffering from hunger and disease and directly or indirectly, they are dying from these-which is exactly what is meant by starvation." 'The morbid chain," one doc- tor said in referring to the propagation of ill-nourished children by ill-nourished mothers "must be broken." This is the unmitigated irony existing within a nation overflowing with food surpluses and wealth while at the same time, it wages a war against hunger and poverty.

Negroes, as holders of an antecedent culture, as participants in a human epoch of history, have been the motive force to bring forth an era free from man's ex- ploitation of man in any age, one in which

198 THE JOURNAL OF NEGRO EDUCATION

there will be made possible the fullest unimpeded development of humanity. The human freedom struggle has always been an ascent from conditions arising out of servitude as it is always a struggle to overcome man made shackles and those which are imposed on man by natural forces. Human freedom has never been bestowed nor have there been any guar- antees that it will be, whether it has been equated with liberty and equality, with the freedom of the spirit or with the freedom of the mind and the intellect. Each step forward in civilization is a step toward freedom, for real human freedom, a corresponding existence in harmony with the established laws of nature. When the freedom struggle is won, it will consist in the control of men over themselves, their actions and over external nature which will be founded on knowledge of natural necessity.

Although Aristotle pedestalized a po- litical ethos which became a philosophy of slavery, human beings could never regard servitude as a natural condition. Freedom has usually been concerned with man's concern for his natural rights and for bringing about in some form a change in the conception of the human rights which have emerged from the overriding influ- ences exerted by those ideas, mores, ta- boos and prejudices associated with slavery, slave and feudal societies, and the sub- jection of human beings in developing capitalist society. It is necessary to fill the long existing gap of any interpretation or analysis of the freedom struggle appro- priate to its real meaning in history as one of the great tests of Western history. When this is done it becomes a sign of a new level of perception of democratic ideals.

Black slavery provided the main basis

for modern racism and for the practices of the Anglo-European-Protestant ethic and the economic and political exploita- tive capitalist system which required the perpetuation of an exploitable group. Thirty years ago, Buell Gallagher3 pointed out the present day (1938) racist tradi- tions as prolongations of the slave codes.

The American nation, born with the oongenital deformity of slavery, was rooted in the seed beds for modern na- tion forming. Slavery, the pivotal and "peculiar" institution provided the eco- nomic bases for the society as private property in land and in slaves. After independence was won, the slave hold- ing states enacted laws to control the slaves and to protect them as property. Slavery impinged upon the family in- stitution and introduced the patterns of oppression which persist until today. Edward P. Morgan has referred to this

as "the forces of law and order overwhelm- ingly white and still displaying the Civil War syndrome of automatic repression of dark skinned citizens."

Enslavement in the American nation was attributed to mental inferiority and heathenish moral perversion, for it was the normal mode of production and it was linked with long held patterns of con- duct and the ways of life associated with an inhuman institution. That, one hun- dred years ago, it was condemned at all is due first of all to the slave revolts, to the abolition movement, to the necessity of the system itself to grow or to smother, a necessity which precipitated internecine struggle. As Professor C. Vann Wood- ward expressed it:4

3 Buell G. Gallagher, American Caste and the Negro College (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1938), p. 28.

4 C. Vann Woodward, "Flight From His- tory: The Heritage of the Negro," The Na- tion, 100th Anniversary Issue, CXVI, Sep- tember 20, 1965.

THE STUDY OF MINORITY PROBLEMS 199

The bleak climate of expectation in which freedom was to grow was even less friendly to Negro aspirations of equality, full citizenship and assimila- tion as the century drew to a close and a new century started. It is in fact hard to find a period of history less congenial to the success of the movement than the hundred years following the end of the Civil War. From the start, the equality movement was haunted by a fateful coincidence of ideas and events at home and abroad deeply antagonistic to the experiment. If the American struggle for national independence had been conducted under historical handicaps half so heavy, it is doubtful that it would have lasted so long, if indeed it could have carried off at all. An at- tempt to understand the failures, re- gressions and betrayals of American race policy during the century that has just ended will have to take into account those fateful handicaps.

One handicap was the ideologically in- doctrinated racism in Western culture with which Anglo-European Protestant ethnic-economic capitalism was so imbued. From the very beginnings of the develop- ment of the social sciences in America, racist ideology characterized and domi- nated the academic environment and the Teutonic origins theory was given uni- versity endorsement. All the while, the racist ideology became compounded by becoming an unrecognized and ignored pathology developing into anti and pseudo scientific views concerning the races of mankind. Such phenomena were associ- ated with the prevailing anti-intellectual- ism and knownothingness of postbellum America too easily transformed into the irrationalism of a benighted, illiterate white society. Moreover, it was compara- tively easy to perform the intellectual transplantation of British Social Darwin- ism to the receptive soil of America where Social Darwinism fitted in so well and

fused with the biology, psychology, peda- gogy and social science teaching of the higher learning in America.

Social Darwinism only gave a false logic to the dogma of race superiority. "Genetic symbols rapidly took priority over all others in social thought. This meant that the high incidence of poverty, illiteracy, dis- ease and crime among Negroes was con- genital and unalterable." 5 The combina- tion of infusing the educational and the cultural life of the nation with racist theories in support of legal, political and religious institutions constituted the sys- tem of institutionalized racism which emerged in the United States during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The widespread riots were predominantly racial as aspects of the dominant racist practices in the nation. Such practices in- dicated then and now the failure of Americans morally and ethically to come to grips with the central domestic crisis of recent history.

Tle problems arising out of the strug- gle for educational equality are transcend- ent in the freedom movement for they are the most many sided of all of the factors. From the earliest times of the enforced settlement of Negro slaves in America, education was always of prime importance for slave and freedmen alike, since educa- tion was universally proscribed for slaves. The first to be educated, some formally and the self-educated, always sought to share such new found freedom from ignor- ance and bondage with their fellow bonds- men. This was true of Banneker, Benizet, Douglass, tlle Cardozos, John Russwurm and many others. After the Civil War, often in alliance with the rising trade

r Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, Rev. Ed. 1959), p. 56.

200 THE JOURNAL OF NEGRO EDUCATION

union movement, Reconstruction leaders sought to put into operation the free pub- lic school systems in the Southern states. Most of the first institutions of ilearning were founded only two or three years after Emancipation and were manned by carpetbaggers, and dedicated abolitionists of both sexes.

The problems of Negroes in the cities are most frustrating with respect to em- ployment, housing, police brutality, poli- tics, business and rampant crime. The urban Negro, the suburban white ma- jority, the national state and municipal government and the world are all too aware of these problems. The ghetto of the Negro is one of the most hopeless blights in America, for out of it emerged Watts, Harlem, Newark, Roxbury, Bed- ford-Stuyvesant and the concomitant crea- tion of an urban lumpen proletariat. E. Franklin Frazier always pointed out that the New World creation, the black ghetto, became institutionalized as an inhibiting factor and as an oppressive and repressive force-what John Gardiner of the Urban Coalition said when he called the cities, "fragmented worlds of ignorance, fear and hostility, not communities, but encamp- ments of strangers."

In the black ghetto of the North one becomes aware of the difficulties of im- plementing the best means of communica- tion so that the result is a corrosion which stifles community self-determination. The talented few are drawn off by specially bestowed opportunities, so that the neu- tral roles they play result in the perma- nent loss of any unifying leadership. What follows is the creation of a ghetto culture and several sub-cultures which become de- humanizing leading to depersonalization and permanent damage to the psyche. All of which keeps the minority-majority re-

lations in a state of retrogression. These dehumanizing forces lead to a deep sense of alienation, which, in turn lead to iconoclasm, anarchy and nihilism.

Since there is no freedom of choice in the ghetto society, especially as to where one lives, land acquisition is denied. The ghetto inhabitant is denied access to the means of production and he has no par- ticipation in the social structure of capi- talist production. The control of the eco- nomic structure by the absentee forces leads to an overriding interest in contain- ment rather than to any interest in curing social ills and the revolts within the ghetto are revolts against exploitation. Riots and revolutions are the end result of release and rebellion against the past and they issue into the profound violence so deeply inherent in our racially oriented and mo- tivated society. The grievous lack of knowledgeability about the causes of desti- tution, crime and the forces which create them, the control of these -forces and the methods to be employed for their elimi- nation constitute the social theorem.

In the academic community, these fac- tors are ignored by philosophers, social scientists and ethicists alike. American philosophy, imbued with interests in so- cially useful systems of thinking has pro- duced as yet no genuinely ethical approach to the complex socio-economic-political problems of the ghetto culture. Rather, the mainstream of recent American thought has been occupied with an attempt to cut away the ethical context surrounding hu- man behavior in order to guarantee the efficiency of the instruments of thought and action. Neither the social scientist nor the philosopher can realize that the diagnosis of our ills is the cancer of eco- nomic and social racism or that the disease is approaching a terminal stage.

THE STUDY OF MINORITY PROBLEMS 201

Facts about the minority group culture are and remain stubborn things and the crueller they are, the more violent will be the methods for their extirpation. These facts give rise to the many problems which are the subject matter and which serve as the basis for the analysis of the content of a freedom movement. There remains the crisis in leadership with respect to positive changes in policy, curriculum and citizenship. Black power, education re- form, whatever, must be programmed in order to cope with and resolve the crisis in leadership. The defining of the best and the most expedient ways toward effec- tive social change in a complicated mass society is always difficult, particularly where minority groups are confronted by problems few such groups have been able permanently to cope with-survival in a racist society.

Are there prescriptions for bringing about order out of this growing dishar- mony? What methods, aims, and pro- gramming can minority groups employ even within the context of increasing struggle? The Civil Rights Bill benefited a few within the middle class, but all such legislation must be seen as being irrelevant to the most basic ghetto prob- lems. To what extent are Negro self- organization and programming to be con- sidered as not ends in themselves, but necessary concomitants to amass the fight- ing strength with which to secure freedom and an end to discrimination or enforced separation from the nation? The main problems seem to be the infusing of his- tory with purposes and goals and devising techniques for inducing among men a sense of mission and dedication to those purposes and goals.

Perhaps theories of protest are neces- sary under the prevailing circumstances to

which men must become sensitive in which protest is effective in achieving consequences and those in which it is not. Protests arise when there is dissatisfaction with the existing practices of governments and with the current programs of organi- zations when they are left out of the decision-making process. Theories of pro- test are necessary when they represent the views of intelligent and rational men who have no voice nor any media for communi- cating protest. Change, even when it is slow, grows around a nucleus which feeds it, particularly in the civil rights move- ment where there are appeals to widely held and shared ideals.

The techniques for creating the pre- conditions of change often are different from the techniques necessary for crystal- lizing a change. Where the society and nation and culture are so divided and ambivalent, protest movements designed to push them in one direction may easily arouse movements of counterprotest de- signed to resist the movement or to puslh it in the other direction. This phenome- non will be witnessed within the various agencies of local and state governments and on the campuses of the nation.

There is justification in making distinc- tions between protest movements and edu- cational movements, but not in the case of the freedom movement. There are two movements, the one designed to crystallize the change, the other to push the society towards a change for which it is not yet ready. The "low-keyed" and "educational" organizations may have to be swept aside and pushed into the dustbin of history when the moment for protest arrives as being wholly inappropriate under the cir- cumstances. But, it is argued that the protest movement will do its own educat- ing, while at the same time, it employs

202 THE JOURNAL OF NEGRO EDUCATION

theories and techniques to implement pro- grams of action. And, these will in turn become manifestos, manuals and guides to action.

There must be means of amelioration, methods and tools to implement change, whether theoretical, gradualistic or vio- lent. There must be included the dis- tinction between values and means to the realization of values so that means do not become ends in themselves. This is so because in the fullest liberation of man and revolutionary change there must be the desideratum that these actions of change are the means to that end. There are possibilities of laying the bases for an organized leadership, one which would create an amalgam of forces, going in a single direction-another emancipation- or a new declaration of independence-all striving for re-enactment of the 14th Amendment and readmission of America into a United Nations of world citizenship.

Revolutionary dynamics which were set into motion were arrested when there was a denial of economic independence after the Hayes election of 1876. In Lerone Bennett's Confrontation: Black and White, the question of change brought about by violent means versus nonviolent means, the problem is put graphically by pointing to the "agony of Martin Luther King." In his comments on Dr. King, he writes:

King contended that soft answers turned away wrath, but there was no confirna- tion of this theory in the Black Belt areas of the South. The period between 1955 and 1959 was punctuated by a series of violent incidents, by lynchings, murders and the bombing of churches, synagogues and schools. Many Negroes, particularly intellectuals had deep mis- givings about the philosophy of love and non-violence. Though not necessarily

violent, they insisted on the right to self-defense and they scorned the idea of loving their oppressors.

There are the necessities for assaying the problems of confrontation which allow us legitimately to make estimates of the inevitability of or the acceptance of the possibility of violence in the struggle for racial justice in America. The dilemmas, conflicts and postures reflect the nature of American violence. The growing trend and the greater resort to violence as the fastest way to change the world and all that lies therein is symptomatic not be- cause violence is an effective force for social change, but precisely because it is often a catalyst. Violence can never be condoned as a method, or as a solution to the complex problems of society. Even as a salient social fact of American life it can never be healthy, even though it can be a constructive element if progressive change emerges from violence. Although the use of force should never be elevated to a rank of a necessary condition of prog- ress, nevertheless a truism does emerge: that the most outspoken and rebellious of the black leaders and militant activists do enjoy the silent sympathies of the anony mous millions who have little patience with theories of protest or Christian, Ghandian nonviolence, but who too often share the resentment expressed by revo- lutionaries.

Open conflict results in a cycle of reactions, which the majority dominance has unwittingly generated against itself, often bring the methods of violence and force out into the open. When the life of any society is directed from the outside, violent and disruptive relationships de- velop.

Freedom, as an ethical or political end, is a stage in human progress. Each step

THE STUDY OF MINORITY PROBLEMS 203

forward in civilization is a step toward freedom, real human freedom and of an existence in harmony with the established laws of nature. In a volume, What The Negro Wants, edited by Rayford W. Logan,6 the architect and formulator of the contemporary philosophy of the Negro Freedom movement, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, wrote the following words, twenty years before his death:

Finally, and in summation, what is it that in sixty years of purposive endeavor I have wanted for my people? Just what do I mean by Freedom? Proceed- ing from the vague and general plans of youth, through the more particular program of active life and on to the general, and at the same time more

6 Rayford W. Logan, What the Negro Wants (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).

specific plans of the days of reflexion, I can see overlappings and contradictions, these things: By "Freedom" for Negroes I meant and still mean, full economic, political and social equality with Ameri- can citizens, in thought, expression and action, with no discrimination based on race and color. Any ethical analysis about minority-ma-

jority group relations in America must conclude that while ethical judgments must change because of the cleavages in historical developments, the only sound basis for enlightened ethical judgments must be found in scientific analyses of nature, in man and in his social relations. Ethics is to be derived from its only source, the life of man in nature and society. If that life reveals an ethical process toward ever greater freedom it is only because men necessarily seek to master nature and their social interrelationships more effec- tively.